


Homing

by spuffyduds



Category: Slings & Arrows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Lear, Anna starts building a new life--but it turns out to be not all that new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homing

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Thing One for discussing catapults, and to the DearHub, likeadeuce and inlovewithnight, who all offered betas at a ridiculously late hour.
> 
> Written for kormantic

 

 

She tried going back to Bolivia after Geoffrey and Ellen's wedding, but it seemed increasingly unreal, just--not what she was supposed to be doing. She kept leaving the office of the Party for Change in the evening and thinking, "Oh, I should drop by the theatre bar," before she remembered that there wasn't one. Or drifting awake in the morning with a rough idea for the next Festival subscription mailing sketched out in her head--full-color, tri-fold, slick paper, very nice--and then thinking, oh, yes, no longer my problem.

Besides bar thoughts and brochure dreams, another thing tying her to her old life--the one she'd thought she made a fairly clean break with--was the surprising amount of mail she got from it. Geoffrey wrote once a week or so. He was apparently using a manual typewriter--where had he even _found_ a manual typewriter?--with some sort of ink problem that turned all the lower-case a's into circular blobs, so she halfway thought of herself as "Anno" now. His letters were full of detail--the rats in the Theatre sans Argent basement outnumbered the people in attendance at Julius Caesar; one advantage of a ramen-noodle budget was that Ellen no longer tortured him by attempting to cook gourmet meals; Maria had joined the company, having finished out her Festival season contract and then given Richard her resignation in a rather spectacular way involving paint-filled balloons and a small homemade catapult.

Frank and Cyril wrote now and again, with pictures of their garden shop and snarky gossip they'd heard about New Burbage. And strangely, _Richard_ wrote, after a fashion; he sent her clippings of favorable reviews of Festival shows. Just the clippings--no notes, not a personal word, but definitely his handwriting on the address; she'd deciphered it often enough to know. She was uncertain whether this was meant to be gloating or apology; possibly Richard didn't know himself.

And then one morning she was elbow deep in the Party's ancient Xerox machine, powdered ink under her fingernails and down her cleavage and she was fairly sure up her nose, and one of the more unpleasant revolutionaries she'd met stuck his head out of the meeting room and said, "You will make coffee?"

She stood up, walked over to him. Put her palm in the middle of his white shirt, making a perfect black handprint; smiled and said, "No," and walked out of the office.

She started walking to her rented room, and people were avoiding her on the street, looking at her sideways, because she was still covered with ink and looked like a--a chimney sweep, probably; she started humming "Chim-chim-cheree," to herself, and then burst into tears, because what _now_?

When she got home there was an envelope from Geoffrey, and she sniffled and opened it, getting it all smudgy. It was a very short note, for him; it said:

Deorest Anno,

Theotre sons Argent is suddenly on ironic nome; Borboro the Lizord Queen knows some zillionoire in LA who hotes Dorren Nichols, opporently hoving met him, ond funded the hell out of us just to piss Dorren off. We hove oll quit our doy jobs. We hove even bought rot trops. Wish you were here. Love, Geoffrey

She washed her hands, got out some notepaper and wrote:

Dearest Geoffrey,

1) Yes, I will be your Executive Administrative Director.

2) This means I will _have_ an Associate Administrative Director. The AAD will make _me_ coffee.

3) I will _not_ have interns. Ever.

4) For God's sake, Geoffrey, buy a computer.

Love,

 ~~Anno~~ Anna

********************************************

Going shopping for office equipment with an unlimited budget was better than sex, or at least better than sex with self-involved playwrights.

Anna sat in her shiny office with her shiny copier, and the computer and fax that still smelled like office supply store, and just _beamed_ for a moment before she turned anything on. Geoffrey poked his head in; he always looked startled to see her, and then delighted. "Frank and Cyril are coming in," he looked at his watchless wrist, blinked--"any second now, to see if we can fit them into Much Ado somewhere."

"I thought they--" Anna said, but Geoffrey had already sighted an actor down the hall, and was barreling after him, yelling, "Jesus Christ, not THAT much eyeliner! Shakespeare, not Torch Song Trilogy!"

All her machines were still warming up when Cyril and Frank showed.

They gave her a simultaneous gape--"Geoffrey didn't tell us you were back!"--and a simultaneous hug; she felt like a child at Christmas, smushed between uncles. Nice.

"Oh, it's so good to see you," she said. "But--what happened to the garden shop? Bad economy?"

"Oh, no, no, we were doing quite well," Frank said.

" _Too_ well," Cyril said. "The gnomes especially. Bit of a fad right now. We'd order the five or six that we could fit into their spot in the store, and they'd be all gone in a day."

"But--that's good, isn't it?"

"Well," Cyril said, "We were living in the apartment behind the shop. And so we thought, right, we'll just order a _lot_ of gnomes at once, store the extras in our place. _But_ \--Frank's got an old-man bladder these days, wakes up two and three times a night."

"'M' younger than _you_ ," Frank said mutinously.

"Yes, duckie, four whole months, I'm a cradle-robbing pervert," Cyril said, rolled his eyes, then smiled at Anna as though everything were all explained.

"I'm not sure I--" she said. "Bladder--gnomes-I don't quite..."

"Have _you_ ever woken up with twenty-seven garden gnomes staring at you?" Frank said.

"Screamed bloody murder," Cyril said. "Every time. Which was bad enough. But then the upstairs neighbor comes down to the shop one day, and he says, "Look, I don't have any problem with you two buggering each other, bully for you, but could you not do it _quite_ so loudly at two o'clock in the morning?"

"And we thought, right, back to the theatre for us," Frank said.

Anna plopped down in her very expensive ergonomic chair and laughed until she hiccupped. "I'm glad to have you back where you belong," she said, finally.

And then Geoffrey swept into the office in his ratty coat, and said, "Oh, thank God you two showed, the 'Much Ado' director is fine with the text and the onstage direction but she's _shit_ with the cast offstage, all of them under thirty cry every time she _speaks_ to them, _Christ_. At this point all I could talk her into giving you is messengers and watchmen, bigger parts next play of course, but can you--be elder statesmen with the young ones, tell them the director doesn't hate them?"

"She doesn't hate them?" Frank said.

"Of course she does. Lie."

"Certainly," Cyril said. "But why aren't you directing?"

"Ellen said she wouldn't Beatrice anybody else's Benedick," Anna said, and hiccupped.

"Shut _up_ , Anna," Geoffrey said cheerfully. "And come on, you two, you can start with convincing Claudio he doesn't need to look like David Bowie."

Once she'd hired an Associate Administrative Director she scarcely ever had to answer the phone. But she was always _delighted_ to, during the few minutes each morning when Phillip was making her coffee.

One morning she picked up with "Theatre sans Argent!" and a deep voice answered, "Hello, I have worked with Geoffrey Tennant and with Maria before and I wondered if there were any available--" and Anna thought, "What a lovely accent!" and then--

" _Nahum_!?!" she said.

" _Anna_!?!"

She caught him up on her return, then said, "So--who made you snap, Darren or Richard?"

"Mr. Nichols I avoid," he said. "But Richard-- _Richard_."

"Yes."

"He is directing 'Oklahoma." He has a cat and a dog onstage at the same time. They are leashed. But they _want_ to kill each other, and they are pulling on their leashes, and one night they will succeed. I went to Richard's office and said, "I do not wish to clean blood and entrails off the stage."

"And?"

"He said, 'The cat and dog will learn to get along.' And then he began to _sing,_ 'The farmer and the cowman should be friends.'"

"Oh God."

"I think perhaps he was high."

"Probably."

Nahum ended up Facilities Manager, which meant that he was quite busy making sure they were in compliance with fire codes and electrical codes and handicapped-accessibility codes, and dispatching his staff with their mops to wherever the latest episode of nervous vomiting was. But he often made time, on his breaks, to stop by Anna's desk. Not something he'd done back in New Burbage, but then Anna was seldom at her desk, there; usually she was off dealing with a crisis.

"It's strange," she told Nahum, as they watched Phillip racewalk by with a box full of audience surveys in one hand and a bag of takeout for Geoffrey in another. "I can actually settle in and work on designing brochures and forecasting the budget, because whenever there's some minor crisis Phillip says, "I'll deal with it," and then he _does_. It's just...strange."

Nahum shrugged. "You have acquired an Anna," he said. "You deserve one most of anybody."

She blinked at him for a moment until that sank in, and then her neck got all warm and itchy and she had to work not to cry.

On the opening night of Much Ado, she slid into the open space left in the staff-reserved row, which happened to be next to Nahum. She'd gotten a new dress in a deep velvet green, to celebrate her--her new old life, was how she had decided to think of it. He smiled and handed her a playbill, and she smiled and took it from him and didn't say, "No thank you, I've spellchecked this so many times I've memorized it," and my goodness, he had just _huge_ hands, long elegant spidery fingers.

And then the play caught her, Geoffrey and Ellen sparking and spiraling away from each other and back again, and she forgot that Nahum was sitting next to her or even that she was a person sitting; the play was all there was.

She was startled to land back in herself at the end, and startled again when Nahum reached over and took her hand. Her hand just _disappeared_ in his.

He smiled a little, and said, "I chased people away from this seat until you got here."

She flushed, because people were still getting up and leaving around them, and also because now she needed to say, _had_ to say, "These things never work out for me, and someone from work is a bad idea to begin with, and you're a lovely man _but_."

But. Then she thought, "No pasaran," and she squeezed his hand.

He walked her home, and at the door she offered him some tea, and he nodded and came in. She was not entirely sure what she wanted that to mean about the evening.

She brought the tea tray to the couch and sat it on the coffee table. She was amused that he added a ridiculous amount of sugar, and cast about for something to say.

"I don't believe I told you, Sophie called today? You know, Cordelia?"

"Ah, yes! She was quite wonderful."

"Yes," Anna said. "She told me she'd been getting great reviews in regional repertory, and that this morning she got a very formal and condescending letter from the New Burbage board telling her that they were 'lifting the ban' on her. That she'd been young and impressionable, and they were willing to have her audition for them again."

"Oh my," Nahum said.

"She said it was 'like a friggin' pardon from the Queen.' She was calling to see if she could come to _our_ next auditions."

Nahum smiled hugely, and then he put two fingertips under her chin, leaned down, and kissed her. Just one kiss, and it was a soft short kiss, and _courtly_. It was very clear from that kiss that there were many other things he would like to do; it was also very clear that he had no intention of doing any of them _tonight_. Which was--unexpected, and somehow lovely.

She smiled back at him and said, "Mmmm," and they drank tea and sat in comfortable silence for a minute or two.

"I wonder which refugee will come back to us next," he said, finally, and slid his arm over her shoulders.

"Maybe Ellen's lizard," she said. And as soon as it was out of her mouth it sounded disturbing, and disturbingly _likely_.

Nahum looked as if he were considering the possibility and not caring for it either; he grimaced and said, "If I hear a scratching at your door, I do not believe I will answer it."

Anna laughed and kicked her shoes off, then put her feet comfortably up on the couch, and leaned back into his warmth.

 

 

 


End file.
